After the guns fall silent
Lynne Kutsukake’s debut novel is a tale of defeat, despair and redemption in postwar Japan
When we think of war, we often think about the horror of armed conflict. What we don’t always consider is the aftermath. What happens in the days and months and years after the guns fall silent and the tanks retreat? How do people cope? How do they grieve their losses, heal their pain and return to the land of the living?
Retired University of Toronto librarian Lynne Kutsukake’s debut novel, The Translation of Love, explores these questions with an epic tale of defeat, despair and redemption.
The novel is set in postwar Tokyo, as a nation comes to terms with its occupation. The narrative follows two preteens: Fumi, a spirited Japanese who’s desperate to find her missing sister, a bar girl in Ginza, and Aya, a timid Japanese-Canadian from Vancouver. Aya has arrived after being interned at a camp in the Rocky Mountains, shipped out in the fall of 1946 and repatriated to a country she’d never known.
The pair form an unlikely friendship and launch a search for Fumi’s sister. They discover what seems like a lifeline: during this bleak period, Japanese citizens have taken to penning hundreds of thousands of letters to the American leader in charge of the occupation, Gen. MacArthur, making passionate pleas for assistance.
The girls write their own letter and it triggers a series of events that take them to the darkest and most dangerous corners of the city. In the process, they encounter a cast of characters struggling to reconcile themselves to great loss.
Kondo Sensei is their brilliant schoolteacher and a moonlighting translator in Love Letter Alley, where Japanese women go to get notes from G.I. boyfriends translated.
Corp. Matt Matsumoto is a Japanese-American soldier in MacArthur’s translation unit and his co-worker, Nancy Nogami, is a Japanese-American typist impatiently waiting to return to the U.S.
Through these interwoven stories, a portrait of a wounded people emerges. Kutsukake artfully paints a picture of a country haunted by trauma, but nevertheless moving forward and learning to find joy in life once again.
Kutsukake was a finalist for the Journey Prize in 2010 — and although she previously told the Star she is a “a late, late, late bloomer” she’s also been named a New Face of Fiction for Knopf Canada for this book in the 20th anniversary year of the program. It’s well deserved: this is richly researched and deeply moving — a beautiful debut. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.